1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a vehicle controller provided with a sensor that detects a driving condition of a preceding vehicle.
2. Related Art
A hybrid vehicle provided with an electric motor and an internal combustion engine as power sources actively shuts down the engine depending on the driving condition in order to reduce the fuel consumption of the engine. There has also been developed a vehicle provided with an engine as a power source that shuts down the engine before the vehicle comes to a stop when the speed of the vehicle falls below a predetermined level in order to reduce the fuel consumption of the engine.
When the driver of such a vehicle that shuts down the engine during running depresses the accelerator pedal to accelerate the vehicle, the vehicle needs to restart and rev up the engine. Accordingly, response associated with the acceleration is degraded. To solve this problem, there has been proposed a hybrid vehicle that inhibits engine shutdown when a vehicle is running on a ramp of an expressway in order to improve the response associated with vehicle acceleration (Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication (JP-A) No. 2009-24529).
Based on location information received from a navigation system, the hybrid vehicle described in JP-A No. 2009-24529 determines whether or not a road on which the vehicle is running is a ramp of an expressway and, when determining that the road is a ramp, inhibits the engine shutdown. However, a situation where good vehicle acceleration performance is needed cannot be determined by the type of road only, and is dependent on other vehicles' driving conditions. For this reason, it is desirable that the response associated with vehicle acceleration is improved under various driving conditions, in addition to operation on a specific road.